I. Field of the Disclosure
The technology of the disclosure relates generally to operations of a timing framework within wireless multimedia systems.
II. Background
As the use of wireless mobile devices, such as smart phones, has proliferated, the number and types of applications available for the wireless mobile devices have increased. One of the most common types of mobile applications provides for the storage and playback of multimedia content. While earlier generations of such applications have focused on music, the use of video files is also being enabled on newer mobile devices as wireless networks provide greater bandwidth and the mobile devices provide greater processing power.
In the earliest aspects of audio- and video-capable mobile devices, a user would typically listen to audio or audio elements within a video file using wired headphones, and later using a wireless headphone set. Many wireless headsets initially were designed to work using the Bluetooth® protocol, and this protocol remains popular among many users. Recently, however, the Wi-Fi Alliance has promulgated the Miracast™ standard, also known as Wi-Fi Display (WFD), to enable wireless screencasting based on underlying 802.11 standards promulgated by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE). Screencasting according to the Miracast standard enables wireless delivery of audio and video to or from desktops, tablets, smart phones and other devices. For example, a user may echo a display from a phone or tablet onto a television, or share a laptop screen with a conference room projector in real time, as non-limiting examples.
Early efforts to screencast or otherwise wirelessly stream audio to a user were bandwidth-limited, which necessarily resulted in compromises in the quality of the audio so produced. As available bandwidth has increased, so has demand for more sophisticated audio capabilities (e.g., six-, seven-, or eight-channel surround sound, as non-limiting examples). Current standards and protocols may not be suited to provide such sophisticated media capabilities in a wireless context, particularly with regards to synchronization of content streams. In particular, while the existing Miracast standard allows point-to-point communication, it does not support point-to-multipoint communication for sharing multimedia content. Moreover, the Moving Pictures Expert Group version 2 transport stream (MPEG2-TS)-based timing framework used in the current Miracast standard only provides for synchronization of multimedia streams received by a single multimedia sink device.